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Graphene antennas would enable terabit wireless downloads

March 6, 2013

Nano-device hardware architecture (credit: Georgia Tech)

Researchers at Georgia Tech have drawn up blueprints for a wireless antenna made from atom-thin sheets of carbon, or graphene, that could allow terabit-per-second transfer speeds at a range of about one meter, MIT Technology Review reports

This would make it possible to obtain 10 high-definition movies by waving your phone past another device for one second. At even shorter ranges, such as a few centimeters, data rates of up to 100 terabits per second are theoretically possible.

To make an antenna, graphene could be shaped into narrow strips of between 10 and 100 nanometers wide and one micrometer long, allowing it to transmit and receive at a terahertz frequency, which roughly corresponds to those size scales. Electromagnetic waves in the terahertz frequency would then interact with plasmonic waves — oscillations of electrons at the surface of the graphene strip — to send and receive information.

Graphene antennas could also enable faster wireless connections between nanoscale components on chips.

With this antenna fastened to the Brain Computer Interface that was discussed in an article here yesterday joined with the graphene supercapacitors, flexible carbon nanotube circuitry, and flexible batteries, this could enable the paralyzed to control robots to meet all their needs.

In time these implants will let us all link up DNA computers in our heads to those organic spintronic memory cells that were described in this newsletter last year.

You do remember those organic spintronic cells, don’t you Amara? The ones that had a cage of 51 atoms with a single atom of iron in their centers. These organic spintronics joined with all of these other gadgetrons will allow us to get our heads out into the Cloud.

Yes Gorden, all these technologies are converging, and someday soon they will permit very high speed 2-way wireless data transfer between brains and computers. At that point, not even the sky is a limit.

Gorden, I’ve been reading comments on this website for about a year now, and have never seen you make a comment which is less than fascinating. Do you have a website of your own with some of your ideas explained more fully? I share your optimism for the future and I’m always on the lookout for signposts (such as KurzweilAI) which tell us our direction of travel into it.

Yes. Storage is adequate — in one second: 1012b = 1011B = 100GB (portable 100GB hard drives are available) or ten 10GB movies — but current limitation is write speed. Would be interesting to check forecasts on future write-speed improvements with spintronics, etc. and see if the tech they are developing is timed for fast write speeds to be available.

Why would you assume non-solid state drives will survive as technology improves. As wrote speed becomes more and more of a bottleneck, solid state memory will get cheaper, smaller and faster, and spinning drives will eventually become archival storage.

spintronics are on their deathbed. Samsung has already created a fully functioning graphene memory chip (yank open a 512 GB solid state drive from them and look at one of the silicon chips on it. The graphene chip (which is actually about a half centimeter shorter lengthwise) can hold that entire solid state drive and write to it 300+ times faster without oxidizing it, and the tech isn’t even perfected yet). Rotational memory even with seagate’s 1TB per square inch density, is all but done at this point. 12 years is all it will take at the rate amd, intel, MIT, Cambridge, and China are going.

That was my thought. Take for instance, the sequential write speed of the iPhone5: 1.38 GB/sec. At an average HD movie file size of 1.5GB, it would take at least 11 seconds for the phone to write 10 HD movies to internal storage.

Um, there are storage devices already capable of 800 gigabit throughput, it won’t be long. When we start making wires out of carbon gained from CO2, the world human-computer hybrid revolution will begin.